LOOSE BUCHANANS: Last night I went to an America’s Future Foundation get-together, supposedly a panel discussion on the topic, “What the heck is a neocon?” It ended up being more about, What the heck is a paleocon? Thus it was less than maximally interesting to me. Here are my impressions….

The speakers were Scott McConnell of The American Conservative Magazine (also known as The Smiths Weren’t Gay! Dot-Com), Eli Lehrer (the only one willing to identify himself as a “neo-conservative”), John Zmirak of many things including AmConMag, and Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review fame.

It was kind of like two discussions going on at once, which meant neither of them really got hashed out: a sober foreign policy discussion about the corruption of power, democracy-promotion at the point of a gun, engagement with the outside world, US dependence on other countries, etc.; and a pitched, personal catfight between neocons and paleocons, or, really, between paleocons and EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD. As you can guess from that description, I thought the paleocons came off decently well in the serious foreign policy segment, but totally went off the deep end on every other subject. Sheesh! So it went like this:

McConnell: The “remake the Middle East in our image” project is romantic, utopian, and everything “neoconservatism” initially rebelled against. (Interesting point.)

Lehrer: I like aggressive US foreign policy! And I like big business! And I like a (limited) welfare state! Basically, I just really like power, apparently.

Zmirak: I wouldn’t want my kids to be minorities, because minorities get treated badly. (How do paleocons get treated, John?) Some of the best Catholics are Jews. Pat Buchanan ist der Ubermensch. National Review is run by “Vichy cons” who have sold out to the Nazis, by which I do not mean Nazis, but rather, people who are not Nazis at all. I am the Ann Coulter of the paleocons. I say the things Pat Buchanan is afraid to say! In short, I am out of my gourd.

Ponnuru: (his actual first line:) “I’d rather be a Vichy con than a bitchy con….” Here’s where I deny that you have to sign on to the Weekly Standard “U.S. Military World Tour!” plan in order to support the Iraq War. Here’s where I totally hedge about what the limits of American ability/need/mandate to enforce freedom in tyrannical countries actually are. Here’s where I point out that I have written more about life issues than most paleocons combined. (This is true, AFAIK, and an excellent point against the pc’s.) Also, um, paleocons are total losers and nobody likes you. Including me.

Responses, gentlemen? McConnell: I forget what he said, I think I went to get another beer at this point because he wasn’t being super-interesting.

Lehrer: I forget, also not hugely interesting.

Zmirak: This is where he rambled about Israel and the conversion of the Jews.

Ponnuru: Read the beginning of a really craptaculous article, a review of Dinesh D’Souza’s book What I Love About America or whatever the title is, from Chronicles, which starts out by listing a bunch of people “from the Orient”–D’Souza, Fouad Ajami, someone I forget, and Ramesh “Kansas Boy” Ponnuru–and saying that they really love America because it allows them to, I quote, “marry white.” Jaws dropped in the room. So Ramesh basically ends by saying, Look, paleocons are insane and creepy, and I wish they would go away.

Then people asked random questions. Nothing illuminating was said after that. I asked a totally incoherent question, one of those things where you think you’ve come up with a cool way to unite seemingly disparate threads of argument, but actually you’re wrong and it would take WAY too much time to spell out the question, so nobody gets what you’re saying. Fortunately the guy right after me phrased part of my question much more coherently, so that was good I guess, but really nobody answered it. (It was basically a two-part thing–for the paleocons, What on earth makes you think we can ACTUALLY avoid G. Washington-disapproved “entangling alliances”? How do you propose to extricate US foreign policy from a globalized world?; for the non-pc’s, Who DON’T you want to invade, and when do we get to leave the places we invade? See, if I’d said it like that, it would have made sense…!)

The crowd was MUCH more paleo-symp than I’d expected, in part b/c AFF tends to attract a lot of libertarians, who seem to be swaying toward the paleocon/left-lib side of things these days–an interesting/troubling trend in itself.

As I said, it turned out to be about “What is a paleocon?” not “What is a neocon?”, which gives some support to the view that “neocon” is just another word for mainstream conservative, but also was less interesting to me b/c the Buchanan movement is creepy and decrepit.